


Rebloom

by Chairman



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-25
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 21:51:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/816437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chairman/pseuds/Chairman





	Rebloom

There is a woman who lives deep in the woods, in a house where no one visits and no one leaves. No one knows who she is, or what she does, though people spread rumors, as they often do. Some say she is a shamed movie starlet; some say she is a former German spy. Some say she is a mad scientist, and they are not wrong. 

There are other whispers, softer and not often heard, of a little girl who lives with the woman; the people speak of the woman’s daughter in tones of sympathy and confusion, of a hidden Alice trapped in the Queen of Hearts’ castle, of the ghost-child of the Hill House deep in the New England woods. Some ask, Where is the little girl’s father? Others reply, in drunken humor, The witch has eaten him up. The little girl does not go to school; she does not go to the movies or the diner or other places young people such as herself go to amuse themselves. She exists in the town’s mind as an enigmatic afterthought. Everyone pictured her small, with long hair tied in two braids; pale like the kind of Gothic girls who live in these kinds of stories, wearing a frock with lace trimming.

The girl does exist, though she has short hair, isn’t exactly pale and wears a plain skirt and shirt. She spends her days in relative solitude, which suit her perfectly. There is no curiosity on her part to the world beyond the woods; there are worlds enough in her books and writing, so she simply puts the outside away; the woods extend forever in her mind, and for the past moments of her existence it serves a sufficient explanation. Only a few may breach her mental reality; her mother, though her presence is always inconstant, her absence existing like a paradox though they live together. No, the mother is a phantom; seen but not felt, a cohabiter but not a companion. The distinction of bosom friend belongs to a fat black cat with a gentlemanly mien; he is getting old now, but age only makes him dearer, the crippled joints keeping him closer to the girl’s side.

The outside is not kind; however strongly the girl may wish for a small utopia within her house filled with books and cats, the bony fingers of death still penetrate the barriers. One morning the cat breathes his last, and the girl is left with a lifeless casing of fur, slightly drooling and eyes half open. The girl looks at the cat and rubs her eyes a little. There may have been tears. She picks up the poor old creature and walks uncertainly around her bedroom, into the hallway, out to where light shines mercilessly through the leaves in mock joy. Should she speak to her mother about the dead cat? No, her mother will merely take the cat away and it will not exist, just as she is able to magic food and clothes into existence, use her sorcery to transport herself everywhere within the house. 

The girl is young but not foolish; she merely prefers to comprehend the complexities of magic and wizards, of charms and spells, instead of the more rigorous pursuits of science. Particle teleportation, genetic cloning and suspended animation are foreign words to the girl, incantations with hidden dangers. The corpse is fresh, still stiff with the contractions of muscles, only beginning to rot with the microbes in the air. The girl wanders around in the outside, the cool air of early March ambivalent to the dead cat in her arms. The girl thinks for a moment under the oppressive light, and smiled. 

The mausoleum! What a fitting resting place for her beloved friend, what a fine piece of architecture to be finally put to use. She has always wondered why such a monument exists, why her mother spent the time to erect it without any apparent need. She pushes open the heavy iron fence and enters the cool stone interior, and breathes in the cool musty air. She tenderly lays the cat down on his back, so he may be merely sleeping, escaping the noonday heat. The girl sits down beside him, listening to the humming of the stone. 

But stones don’t normally hum, she thinks, and begins to feel about the walls of the mausoleum, her ear pressed to the cool stone. Yes, something is humming on the inside. Her fingers reach inside the cracks and protrusions, and suddenly she hears the sound of rock sliding against rock. She turns around and finds a trapdoor opened, with a metal ladder tempting her down into the unknown depths. 

She hesitates, but not too long.

The rabbit hole is short, the adventure not too inspiring. The Chesire Cat is upstairs, either dead or sleeping. At the bottom there is nothing but darkness, winning the battle with the light from above. 

The girl stumbles through the darkness, until her hands find a lever. It could have read Pull Me on the handle. She pulls, and blinding white lights flicker on one after the other. The hallway is long, continuous, but it is the discrete beings stationed there that make the girl pause for breath.

Encased in capsules, lining the walls, are the bodies of black cats in a greenish liquid; are they alive, sleeping or dead? The girl wonders as she stands completely still, looking at the full capsules of chimeras with multiple eyes, disfigured faces and deformed backs. She looks to avoid the empty ones, devoid of any thing or liquid. How many cats are there? How many have been used? She tries to think of the times her own beloved cat went missing, how soon afterwards he reappeared slightly different than before. How many of him has she loved?

A sound begins in the distance; knives on a cutting board, coming closer and closer. The girl knows the sound but she dares not move. She will be caught, whether she is above or below. So she waits as the high-heels click slowly upon the ground, more dangerous in the girl’s mind than the slow cinematic approach of a shark. 

Then the sounds stop, and the strong smell of perfume and alcohol fill the girl’s nose. “Oh dear,” she hears her mother say behind her.

The girl’s heart pounds violently inside her chest, threatening to escape like a bird from a cage. She waits until she can wait no longer, and turns to face the woman she calls her mother. An imposing figure: makeup impeccably made, hair fashionably coiffed. The woman whose presence haunts every corner of the girl’s existence.

“Jaspers died,” the girl says.

The woman purses her lips. “I see.”

“He’s upstairs in the mausoleum.”

“I know.”

The girl chews her tongue, sweat gathering at the back of her neck. “Am I in trouble?”

“No,” the woman smiles wearily. “Luck is just not on my side. Come on dear, you can pick a new cat.”

The girl pulls her hand away from her mother’s searching grasp. “How many have there been?”

“That’s not important,” the woman tries to pet the girl’s hair, but the girl ducks her head away. She sighs. “You’re being difficult, darling.”

“I don’t like being touched.”

“But I’m your mother.”

“I still don’t like being touched.”

“But honey,” the woman pleads.

“You were never there,” the girl says. Why this affection now, she thinks. Why this sudden change of heart, where the woman standing in front of her seemed more like a being of wax than of flesh and blood.

“I thought daughters like having space.”

“Not this much. For most of the time I forgot you were there. Because you weren't there, where you?” The girl looks around her and felt so incredibly small, as the hallway stretches too far and contorts her vision. There is the terminal; there is the long, arduous walk away from life, into the deep mystery of unconsciousness. Of the Void.

“I see,” the woman’s hand drops and hangs helplessly by her side. “I’ve messed up again.” 

The girl turns and looks up at her mother. How sad she looks, the girl thinks as the wax melts to reveal a woman, how oddly human. She quietly takes her mother's hand, and the woman smiles. They walk together, mother and daughter, into the depths of the underground. 

The girl knows, by every step, her end was near. They stop at the edge of a smooth table, with racks of bottles standing at attention. The mother moves directly for one of the bottles, and opens the cork with a pop. She gathers two glasses and fills both with golden-colored liquid, and hands one to the girl.

“Am I supposed to drink this?” the girl asks, smelling the liquid suspiciously. It smells like ice burning, the sensation rising in her sinuses. "It's not my birthday."

“This is your wake,” the mother says, raising a wineglass. “Enjoy, my dear daughter.”

The girl keeps silent, even though she knows what a wake is, even though she wonders why and how you can attend your own wake. She keeps silent and drinks her champagne like a good little girl, the bubbles rising in her nose and the back of her throat like sea foam across the beach, the ephemeral sensation before they pop and expire. 

“I love you, Mom,” she says.

The woman smiles wearily and downs her entire fluke. “You’re just saying that now. You’re such a good little girl, even though your mother messed up so terribly.”

“We can start over,” the little girl says. “People make mistakes.”

“Yes,” the woman says, looking in the distance. “We can always start over.”

The woman glances over to the little girl as if she is already dead. The little girl shivers and smiles, her lips straining against her cheeks, with the little clever face of a good little girl. Good little girls love their mothers, and good little girls get to live. As the blood rushes to her face the little girl ignores the voice of the bad little girl saying it is already too late. Deep in the long hallway of replacement cats she knows there is a room with many locks where little girls are stored, waiting for the time when the living are too bad to continue, when a reboot is necessary. The little girl thinks of the term "solipsism," and wonders if this is what a neuron feels like, inside an Entity's mind forever. How lonely a disease, to see the world with the burden of its existence on your shoulders. The world is never seen through a single pair of eyes, that the girl knows. But unlike her mother, she is only of small consequence, easily repaired as a body heals itself. The burden God carries is no greater than the burden of the beholden, whose existence may cease at any moment, whose death faults both foolishness and conceit. 

How many little girls have there been? Too many, with too many different mothers to count. 

She is a Persephone trapped in an endless spring. There will always be a little girl who lives in the house with her dear black cat. The individual dies but the identity survives. 

“I want to live,” she says. 

Warm fingers catches her face, nails digging into her scalp. The girl avoids the woman's eyes. “You will,” her mother says. “You will always live, just as I will always live, just as I have erased the traces of death and longing from our lives.” The girl sat still has the woman runs her fingers through her no-longer daughter’s hair. If the moment will stay forever, the same little girl and the different mother. But if she blinks, the little girl wonders, how soon will her eyes be different, if she will wake up again in a place paces forward in time. 

There is a girl who lives deep in the woods, in a house where no one visits and no one leaves. Though she has lived for thirteen years, it is today when she will finally receive a name.

Rose Lalonde. The four hundred and thirteenth.


End file.
